I love the Halo games. The first lacked polish and was greatly improved when it’s remastered edition was released. The second succeeded in doing something different in the face of endless WW2 shooters. The third was an elegant, if mildly absurd thrill ride. ODST was a practise run for something better, while Reach was that something better, blending slick gunplay, over the mechanics and solid and emotive plot. I remember plot points from all of them, and can trace the layout of some of the Halo 3 multiplayer maps in my memory.

Halo 4 though – the first game following the breakaway of original series developer Bungie from Microsoft – leaves me cold. I had to look up my Xbox achievements to see if I’d actually finished it, its that forgettable.

The Halo series has never been one to avoid tropes, which can be a sign of bad in itself. Since Halo 3, the games have also been pretty reliant on collectable items, some of which can be missed, to both tell the story and give background and insight into the Forerunners, the race that built the eponymous ring structures. Well used, this can be an effective story-telling tool, rewarding that that are interested in collecting digital trinkets or want to learn more about the setting, but done badly and you end up with games like Assassin’s Creed Unity, where the player is overwhelmed with pointless map icons that are only there for the sake of ticking off a rewardless checklist.

Halo 4 does have these tipbits, and they are used to tell a story. Unfortunately in this case, the main enemy, the Diadact, is first named in a missable movie. When he later appears, the AI character Cortana, who provides instructions to the player character, immediately starts using its name with no name and little way of any explanation or exploration of what the enemy is. Halo often had Go There, Do That instructions, and at their best, they using saving entire planets or making a heroic last stand against overwhelming odds. But without any explanation of why the enemy is the enemy, who they are, what they are, its hard to care about why you are fighting onwards. Just being told something wants to destroy you doesn’t make for compelling storytelling and hiding information that provides crucial understanding of the plot and provides motivation is not just poor writing, but poor game design.

Maybe I’m reading too much into Halo 4. In terms of design, there are a number of design elements which have become as token as a beach assault in a WW2 game or breach and clearing an office building in Call of Duty : the a level with wide open spaces and plenty of Warthogs and Ghosts, a level with a pitched battle fought across a bridge, a level set in badlands and lots of soaring spires and light-bridges. The real meat of the other games, excluding the story focused ODST, is the multiplayer. I haven’t tried Halo 4’s multiplayer, after letting my Xbox Live Gold subscription expire, but I put more hours than I care to remember into Halo 3 and Reach with friends from Glasgow. The fast, arcade style shooting, jet packs and squabbles as a complete stranger repeatedly drives a tank into a cliff-face and brilliant hilarious fun, and presumably remain so. But if that’s the main selling point, then why bother with a story-based campaign at all when greater resources can be deployed to increase the number of maps, or improve other aspects of the game. The success of Bungie with the multiplayer only Destiny certainly suggests that this is a viable business model.

Carpets are expensive. Or at least good quality carpets with separate underlay and professional firing do. So, faced with a mouldy old carpet that needed replacing, I did the only logical thing.

Using the drum sander.

I sanded down the floorboards and covered them in varnish.

Sanding and varnishing a wooden floor still isn’t massively cheap. A days hire of a drum sander and a edging sander clocks in at about £120 before delivery, with enough varnish to cover the twenty square meters three times coming in about £50. The cost of dust bags, sandpaper and painting supplies brought the whole lot to around £200, which I’m pretty sure is less than getting laminate or a decent carpet put down.

The sanding work was reasonably easy. The drum sander which I used to strip the body of the floor handled a bit like a petrol lawnmower, although with more power. It was extremely heavy though, and had to be lifted off the floor frequently so it could be turned round without gouging the floorboards

The floor in our spare bedroom was in shockingly good condition before I started. All that really needed to be taken off was the top layer of grime, water stains and some markings from the sawmill. I started with a medium grade of sandpaper, sanding in a diagonal direction to even out the boards and take off the worst of the muck. Two hours work saw the floor much more level and with most of the stains gone. To finish I used the medium grain sandpaper and worked along the length of the floorboards, before a couple of finishing passes with fine grain paper to give a smooth finish. Continue reading “A Song of Sand and Wood”

I own far too many games. They are a major vice for me. The beginning of the end for the Xbox 360 as a platform hasn’t helped, with many games from the past few years reduced to £10 or less, making them an easy impulse purchase, further compounded by the regular PC game deals on Steam, Humble Bundle and Good Old Games which see recent titles reduced to pennies.

This year, I want to actually play as many of these games as possible.

I also want to blog and write more. So I’m going to play these games and write stuff about them.

I have more games than I can realistically play to completion and good few games on Steam that I got as part of bundles but which I’m not desperate to play, so this isn’t some kind of completionist effort or an attempt to play every single game. I just want to make sure I justify my collection and my hoarding. Continue reading “Clearing the Gaming Backlog”

In mid-October, I managed to get all of the components for my new PC together. Building something like this – knowing that so many of the options involved were solely my decision and not dictated by a console maker or a PC manufacturer – was extremely satisfying.

You can read about my reasoning for the various components here. I have been very happy with performance of the components so far. Both the graphics card and the processor fan are much quieter than I was expecting, even when running a new game like Arkham Origins with the best graphics options. It isn’t completely silent, but it’s difficult to hear over ambient noise and impossible to hear over noise from a game or DVD. Compared to both the original Xbox 360 and the Xbox 360 Slim, it is much, much quieter.

Assembling the computer was relatively easy. The biggest problem I had was running out of desk space for everything I needed to have to hand. Access to a large kitchen or dining table would have been really helpful.

Other problems were extremely minor. Having no experience using modern Intel sockets, I was expecting the processor to fit into place sharply. When the bracket closed with a noise that is more of a creak than a snap, I was quite surprised and it took me a few minutes to make sure I had inserted everything correctly and wasn’t mashing the pins on the bottom of the processor into a pulp.

The final problem I encountered was a cable from the processor’s cooler catching on the fan. This prevented the fan from spinning, leading to a rather toasty processor. Thankfully, I spotted the higher than expected temperature in the BIOS screen when I was checking that everything was correctly set-up and was able to loosen the cable. Ten years ago, that could have led to a fried processor, but most modern chips shut themselves down before damage can be done.

Other than that, I can’t believe how simple the overall process is. I think I’ve had more grief when trying to assemble larger items of Ikea furniture. Of course, a sideboard doesn’t have a dozen fiddly cables which have to be coerced into some vague state of tidiness or very, very small connectors which have to be slipped on to tiny pins.

In terms of performance, it far exceeds what I was expecting. The GTX 760 is more than powerful enough to handle Arkham Origins and Skyrim at 1080P without having to increase it’s fan speed. Both games easily deliver 60 frames per second or higher. In the case of Skyrim, this is delivered without any of the stuttering or texture tearing visible on the Xbox 360 version of the game. The beautiful aurora and near endless landscapes in Skyrim very nearly justify the spend on a gaming PC on their own and I cannot wait to try out some of the higher resolution fan-made texture packs.

After nearly a year of research and deliberation, I have finally taken the big step and ordered the components for my new gaming PC. There have been a few changes in the last few months – particularly the case.

I chose the RAM and hard-drives on the basis of good quality products coming up on offer. I managed to save about £40 this way. The majority of the rest of the components aren’t subject to such big price fluctuations.

I backed off from my previous choice of case due to it’s size, instead opting for some discreet Scandinavian design in the form of the Fractal Node 304. It unfortunately doesn’t have space for a DVD drive, so I’ve picked up a cheap external drive to go with it. Sadly, the internet speed in my area of London isn’t good enough to let me rely solely on software downloads.

Some of the Haswell processors have dropped in price recently, which did make an upgrade to the slightly more powerful i5-4670K, which can be overclocked, but as I have no real interest in overclocking, I stuck with the more than adequate i5-4570.

I’m inclined towards nVidia graphics cards over AMD’s products anyway, so when they GTX 760 came out at the right price point I was half sold on it already. The MSI version of the card is reputed to run both coolly and quietly. I may yet regret going with nVidia over AMD if the use of AMD components in the XBox One and PS4 leads to major games performing better on AMD systems.

Finally, after a long debate with myself, I decided on Windows 8 as an operating system. I really like Windows 7, which I previously had on my Mac and which I use at work. It’s very slick, very simple and looks fantastic. I decided that I didn’t just want to stick with what I know in terms of Windows. I’m sure I can deal with the loss of the Start menu. Anyway, there is always SteamOS if I really don’t like it.

Interestingly, the finished computer will be very similar to some of Valve’s prototype Steam Machine PCs. The main differences are the amounts of storage and RAM.

For a long time, the desktop computer processor market has been dominated by two companies: Advanced Micro Devices (better known as AMD) and Intel. After the PC boom of the 80s when Texas Instruments, IBM and other semiconductor companies were competing on a equal footing only Intel and AMD emerged with high powered, innovative consumer products for the late 90s and 00s. Except for a brief period in the mid 00s, Intel has always been the more dominant of the two companies, despite struggling to gain traction in the lucrative tablet and smartphone markets in recent years.

Back in 2004, I would have been stupid to buy anything other than an AMD processor. While Intel struggled to get faster clockspeeds from the Pentium 4 chips due to heat dissipation problems, AMD had introduced a 64-bit extension to the x86 instruction set, produced a successful consumer 64-bit processor and begun what was to become a near domination of the server processor market. To all intents and purposes, it looked like AMD were about to go from being an underdog to replacing Intel as the dominant power in the processor world.

The situation is completely reversed today. Intel abandoned a large part of the Pentium 4 processor architecture in favour of the Core architecture and have found phenomenal success with it’s increasingly powerful derivatives. AMD are struggling financially and have seen their most recent processors struggle to compete against faster and cooler Intel chips (Ars Technica has a good article about how AMD arrived in this situation).

Given that Intel processors run at much cooler temperatures and use less power while giving greater performance, I am firmly in the Intel camp. Next month, Intel will be launching their next generation processor, based on the Haswell architecture. These are expected to reduce power consumption and heat generated further while retailing at the same price point to the current generation of processor. The Haswell chips also use a new motherboard socket, meaning that a compatible motherboard should last for at least four to six years before needing an upgrade.

As far as models go, I see my choice as being between the enthusiast orientated i5-4670K or a more budget orientated i3 chip. The i5 is a four core processor, due out in June and will likely provide my system with an excess of computing capacity. The i3s haven’t yet been announced, but are expected to go on sale sometime towards the end of the year. The current generation of i3 processors have only two cores but due to poor use of multiple cores by game developers, they are more then capable of running high end games.

There are some arguments for going for an AMD processor over an Intel chip. Xbox Infinity is expected to use an AMD processor and it has already been confirmed that the PS4 will use a customised version of AMD’s Jaguar laptop processor. Some argue that this will lead to games being better optimised to run on AMD hardware. I’m not familiar enough with the diferences between AMDs mobile and desktop processors to comment on this, but given Intel’s dominant position in the market, I find it hard to imagine that developers wouldn’t take the time to optimise games for both Intel and AMD systems. This may, of course, be rather naïve, but only time will tell.

It’s been a very long time since I last bought a pen and paper RPG book. It’s been well over two years since I last played in an RPG game at all. It’s been so long that I don’t even remember where my whisky tin full of dice is, although I know my collection of RPG books is safely buried in a mound of boxes somewhere in my mum’s house.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m glad I bought a Kindle and I found my iPad invaluable when I was still gaming, but I found that neither device could replace my RPG books. My Kindle hasn’t even come close to replacing any type of book in my life thanks to a nasty habit of buying the same book in both hardback and digital forms.

RPG books are a particularly special case though. There is something about the scent of the paper, the glossy illustrations and the crack and snap of the pages that is an essential part of the role playing experience. It’s a particular joy when someone has a newly released book which is getting handed round a group or when you find an old, out of print game in a FLGS or on eBay.

There are also advantages to paper books over their digital equivalents. It’s not unusual for game masters to ban players from reading or referring to particular books to prevent cheating, reading ahead in stories or rules lawyering. If the source books are 300 pages of glossy A4, you can’t really hide them at the table. With a Kindle or an iPad, you could be reading anything at the table.

On the other hand PDF game books are a massive benefit to independent game designers and small publishing houses because they cut out the overheads and the middlemen, allowing direct sales to fans. Which is why they are here to stay.